Essential Guide to Success

Written by David Jerem

1. Your competitors will be fully prepared so you must be too. Don’t fool yourself and think you don’t need to practice as many questions as possible.

2. Maintain a positive mental attitude, think of your aptitude test as an opportunity to demonstrate your ability and outcompete other applicants, not as an onerous mandatory task.

3. Focus on the areas you find hardest, focus the majority of your time on these questions.

4. Be committed – get practicing as soon as possible and make time for practice, get started now.

5. Keep practicing, once you’ve practiced as many tests as possible maintain your skills through question practice right up until the day before your assessment.

6. Contact the company you’re applying to and format they will be in’. Find out what type of tests they will ask you to sit and what format it will be in. Employers are increasingly testing candidates using computers so it’s most important to practice questions in this format.

7. Practice under timed conditions and in exam conditions. This will improve your speed and confidence as well as performance on the day of your examination.

8. Stick to your timings, if you get stuck move on. Further to this don’t simply guess, the more practice you undertake the easier you’ll find it to make educated guesses by ruling out unlikely answers – this will come with practice though.

9. Embrace any anxiety you feel on the day of the examination, while adrenaline and nervousness can be distracting if you’ve prepared sufficiently you can calmly reflect on your practice and be confident you can beat the competition.